My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity

The last of four parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]

Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club.  We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR.  I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before.  He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject.  My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.

But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.

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The reviews of our show in the Madison press were generally positive, and all recommended seeing it.  One reviewer concluded that, “The play works, very well.  The cast demands our attention because it is so vibrant.  There never seems to be a period of rest on stage.  The high energy does not fail, and we are treated to a grand fireworks display that ends the show.” ¹  Another wrote that, “There is the truth and there is the awful truth.  The Broom Street Theater production of “Marjorie Morningstar” succeeds in telling the awful truth and the result is hysterically, grotesquely, painfully funny. . . . It is hard to express how excellent these actors are, or even to single anyone out, they are so uniformly creative and energetic.  It is very, very hard to do what they do and to do it so well.”²

But there were also some important criticisms: inadequate characterization of the title character, too much repetition of characteristic BST moves by the actors, and so on.   One reviewer observed the structural weakness that we had experienced in rehearsals:  that the first parts of the show offered impressive creativity and storytelling, while the last parts compressed too much of Marjorie’s story into too short a time frame, “as the deadline (to complete the play) rolled around.” ³

Reviewers also noted a number of scenes for their hilarity and creativity, including the bar mitzvah scene and the Chinese restaurant scene.

No one mentioned the duck.

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“Theater is Dead”:  Legacies.   Joel died of a heart attack at his home in Madison in June of 2005.  He was 62.

Famously he had often said that “Theater is dead.”  In his last years he more broadly asserted that “Art is dead in America.”⁴  Artistically contrary to his end, his very life disproved these assertions.  At the time of his death, he was contemplating several new projects, including “Polio: An American Story” and “The Most Beautiful Jew in the World,” a comedy about the fashion designer Ralph Lauren.

During his 35 years at Broom Street Theater, he had written and directed 88 original plays, and created and directed 26 adaptations of well-known plays or novels. Outside of their BST performances, Joel kept his plays close to the vest.  None have ever been performed by other theaters.  But from his perch in Madison–which he described as “a good place to do (original) theater, (which) can only be done in an environment that’s slightly isolated but not hermetically sealed”⁵–his influence on American theater has reached far and wide.

Joel’s legacy begins with the theater itself.  At 54 years and counting, Broom Street Theater is one of very few experimental theaters in the nation that has survived so long past its countercultural roots in the 1960s.  It owns its building outright now, and operates in the black even with few major donors.  If no longer dominated by the prodigious work of a single auteur, BST continues the focus on experimental works by local writers.  And there are plenty of Madison-area creatives.  In response to a solicitation of scripts for its show, Unpresidented, a 2018 performance of a series of short plays spanning 200 years of U.S. history, the theater received more than 500 submissions.

Among his most important legacies are the legions of actors who performed for him at Broom Street Theater.  Many went on to create some 20 or more theater groups around the country, from New York and Boston to Chicago and San Francisco–and even one in India. But whether they pursued careers in the arts–for example, Emmy, Tony and Grammy awards winner, André De Shields–or, say, in professional sociology, Joel left indelible marks on each of them.  Some of these marks were less happy than others, as several BST alumni note in the documentary on his life, Filthy Theater. 

Playwright, actor and filmmaker Rob Matsushita observed that he has friends who still hate Joel:  “Man’s been in the ground for years!  They still hate him! Who infuriates somebody so much that they’re still mad at him, and him dead and buried for years?!?”  Years later, too, others remained hurt because Joel had later rejected them as friends, often when they chose to continue their artistic careers along paths other than his.  Jill Holden, who went on to an acting career in movies and television, said that, “Of course Joel was horrified that I was going to graduate school, horrified that I wanted to do regular theater. . . . He said that I had betrayed him and everything he stood for.”

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But many of those cast away by Joel also retained a fondness for him, hence their pain.  Others also credited him for their success in their subsequent careers in the performing arts.  Playwright, actor and director Gip Hoppe, whose plays have been performed on Broadway, London’s West End and in regional theaters across the U.S., said, “There isn’t anything that I do that isn’t absolutely informed by Joel’s aesthetic.  I don’t mean stylistically, but just his kind of sense of freedom on stage.  Everybody has one person in their life that opens up the world for them.  There’s one important person that sets you off on a path.  There’s no question that in my life that was Joel Gersmann.”

“I got the best training in the world from Broom Street,” said alumnus Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to perform on national television shows (among them the Richard Prior Show, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, David Letterman’s Late Show), and a writer on the television series, Roseanne.  “It taught me about commitment, not to be afraid.  What I found also was to take chances, which I later did as a standup (comedian).”

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And as for me?  I had no future in the performing arts, and did not plan to pursue one.  Perhaps that is why Joel and I remained good friends while I was in Madison, and why he seemed to attach himself to me on our cross-country trip to Seattle and back in the late summer of 1976.  My planned future posed no risk to his–firm yet fragile–identity as an artist.  I would not be leaving him, hence he did not need to leave me.  I was safe and trustworthy for him.  And I felt honored to see his softer sides, his low-volume and warm offstage self.  It had its own magnificence.

When he reached out in 1977 to ask me to help transform the old radiator shop into the Broom Street Theater, I was happy, even grateful, to join in the work.  When I encountered him on the streets of Madison–him always with a bag of music recordings and an armful of books, me with a backpack full of work–I was always happy to see him, and he me, and we had nice conversations.  I saw him no more after I moved East in August 1979, and we did not visit over the phone.  It is safe to say that we were both buried in our work.  But when I learned of his untimely death in 2005, I was immediately and deeply saddened, and realized that I had lost a rare friend.  I wrote another friend (who had not known Joel) about my reaction to the news of this death, and my friend replied that he had cried at my letter.  My memories of Joel are indelible, and they are a blessing.

Over the years, I came to realize that in fact I had spent my career as a performer.  After all, to be an effective teacher is to be a creative and versatile presenter, to know how to draw learners in, varied though learners are, to earn their attention and to stoke their curiosity.  The university classroom was my theater.  And, as with Charlie Hill’s observations, I had needed to take chances and to be unafraid in front of groups that were initially strange to me.

I learned almost nothing about teaching when I was in graduate school.  I never taught a course, gave a guest lecture in one, or served as a professor’s teaching assistant.  Instead, I had a series of research positions.  But Joel had put me in front of strange audiences and effectively taught me to just go ahead, that there is no place for fear, embarrassment or equivocation.  All of that helped as I stumbled through a first year of teaching that I knew was poor, followed by semesters of slowly improving and more effective performances.

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It turned out that I was able to practice my theater lessons at my very first academic job-seeking event as I was leaving grad school.  I flew East in the spring of 1979 to interview for a faculty position in the Sociology Department at Yale University.  I was to spend two days meeting with the faculty and graduate students in the Department and giving a lecture to them on my dissertation research.

I arrived at the hotel in New Haven at about 2:30 a.m. the night my interview/lecture day was to begin seven hours later.  And I had to give my lecture one final once-over before going to sleep.  The desk clerk checking me in that night had a letter to give me.  It was from a professor in the Yale Law School who was doing research on topics related to my interests, and it said he would pick me up at the hotel at 7 a.m. for breakfast, then take me to the law school to give a talk to his research group, before delivering me to the Sociology Department.

There were two problems with this.  First, the talk he wanted me to give was not on the schedule the University had sent to me, and it was going to cut in half the scant sleeping time I had left that night.  Second, it was to be a talk on research I was also involved in that was not my dissertation research.  Naturally, I had prepared no such talk for the Law School.  This was an unwanted surprise that felt like a hit job.  But I had no choice but to give a talk.

As I sat down with the professor’s research group that early morning, I took my first chance.  I showed the assembled group my note pad, smilingly pointing out that that it had no notes on it.  Then I simply winged it for about 35 minutes.  During my talk one member of the group walked out, shaking his head.  Broom Street had prepared me for that, too.  His reaction did not distract me at all.  I kept moving.

Two days later, the University offered me the faculty position in Sociology.

THE END

 

 

1. Paul Kornblueh, “A Star Is Born.”  The Daily Cardinal, Oct. 11, 1976, p. 5.  Madison, Wisconsin.[↩]
2. Howard Waxman, “The Awful Truth.”  Isthmus, Oct. 15-21, p. 2.  Madison, Wisconsin.[↩]
3. Dave Wagner, “‘Marjorie’ not up to best BST standards.”  The Capital Times, Oct. 11, 1976, p. 38.  Madison, Wisconsin.[↩]
4. See the documentary on his life and work, Filthy Theater, Daniel Levin, 2012.[↩]
5. See Waxman, “Gersmann of Broom Street–Part II: Thoughts From the Director”[↩]